by Walt Whitman
Read by Orson Welles
Presented by Peter Duval Smith

A Song of Myself was written in 1855, when Whitman was thirty-six, and published in that year as an untitled introduction to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. It was intended as a personal testament; its prophetic tone and the pantheism and idealism which it recommends remained a permanent characteristic of Whitman's verse. For this broadcast the poem has been slightly cut.